Office Equipment Tips
Energy costs for office equipment for a small businesses can be up to $300 a year.
Computers, fax machines, printers and photocopiers are indispensable to running many small businesses today, but the rapid increase in the use of such equipment has seen a steady rise in electricity consumption over the past decade. Cutting your electricity costs will save you money and also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The following tips will help you along the way.
- Make sure your equipment is turned off at the powerpoint at night and on weekends, and even during the day when it is not being used for an extended period of time. This will avoid ‘phantom draw’ through equipment standby mode.
- Use a 7-day programmable timer to ensure equipment is automatically switched off out of hours.
- With your computer, experiment with the delay or default setting to achieve the shortest possible time that’s acceptable before the machine goes to ‘sleep’.
- Consider printer sharing devices such as a manual printer switch that can route jobs to the printer when the switch is set to receive incoming signals from one of two or more computers.
- Reduce paper consumption by minimising the use of full-page cover sheets for fax transmission. Stick-on labels placed on the first page of the fax message not only reduce the amount of energy and paper used, but can also save on phone charges.
- Look for printers with a double-sided (duplex) printing option.
- ENERGY STAR compliant fax machines can scan double-sided pages. This will reduce both your copying and paper costs – it costs TEN TIMES as much to make a piece of paper as it does to print on it!
- Purchase a photocopier that's the right size for you. A mid-volume copier installed in a low-volume office can use 70% more energy per page than an efficient low-volume copier.
- Set your photocopier to automatically default to making two-sided copies to ensure that the duplexing feature is used.
- Run copies together in batches to reduce energy consumption by decreasing the time your copier spends in high-power mode.
- Use recycled paper, preferably with at least 20% post-consumer recycled content.
- Check whether your printer can use recycled toner cartridges to reduce the flow of solid waste that ends up in the nation's landfills.
For more information on star ratings, go to www.energystar.gov.au